Engineer Pleads Guilty in IRS Office Bombing

An aerospace engineer pleaded guilty Wednesday to launching 13 bombs at an Internal Revenue Service office and trying to blow up three others. But he insisted that he never meant to hurt anyone. “The way I set the timing was intended to cause the greatest amount of display with minimal injury to anyone around it,” Dean Harvey Hicks told U.S. District Judge Laughlin Waters. No one was hurt in any of the incidents.

But the prosecutor said a bomb that Hicks planted in a truck at a Los Angeles IRS office had the power to level two city blocks if it had exploded. Hicks, a 45-year-old quality control supervisor at Ford Aerospace, faces up to 43 years in prison. Sentencing is Oct. 16.

He pleaded guilty to three bombing attempts in Southern California; a pipe bomb attack on a regional tax processing center in Fresno, and to sending a threatening letter after the Fresno bombing.